British Foreign Policy Since 1800

I

Introduction

British Foreign Policy Since 1800, the actions, principles, and interests that have shaped British relations with other countries of the world since the French Revolution.

British foreign policy was devised by Cabinets composed initially of representatives of political factions that evolved slowly into political parties with, until the extensions of the franchise in 1918 and 1928, a narrowly defined electoral base (see Reform Bills). As British prosperity was understood to have been created by overseas trade, British foreign policy was designed to protect and increase opportunities for trade and commerce, in order to preserve the position in British society of the shipping, banking, insurance, manufacturing, farming, property, and landed interests. A declaration of 1840 by Lord Palmerston, British foreign secretary at the time, typified the British outlook:

Defending the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the Liberal politician Sir Charles Dilke told Parliament:

Several agencies operated simultaneously to try to achieve the aims and objectives that were the foundations of British foreign policy, the “interests” which, while allies and enemies might come and go, were in Palmerston’s eyes “eternal and perpetual”. These were: the Board of Control of the East India Company (the India Office from 1858 to 1948), the Colonial and War Department 1794-1854, the Colonial Office 1854-1966, the Commonwealth Office 1925-1968, and the Foreign Office (established in 1782 and known since 1968 as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). Speaking in 1896, colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain acknowledged the common goal: “The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones.”

II

India

In a Foreign Office memorandum for the Committee of Imperial Defence in July 1920 it was stated that: “For the last century the policy of H.M. Government has been inductive, intuitive and quite deliberately opportunistic, but through it all has run the dominant impulse of the defence of India.” The main threat to the approaches by sea to the subcontinent was deemed to come from France. The main threat to the subcontinent overland was deemed to come from Russia.

A

Defending British India

In 1801, when French forces dominated the continent of Europe, Britain sent two armies to Egypt to eject the expeditionary force, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, which had landed there in 1798. This was so that the French might not establish a base from which to try to wrest control of India away from Britain (see French Revolutionary Wars). This was followed up by the acquisition of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in 1802, and the capture of the main French base in the Indian Ocean, Mauritius, in 1810. In 1839, the British occupied Aden, as it offered good facilities for naval concentration in force should the Red Sea route to India be menaced. At the time, it looked as if Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman sultan’s Egyptian vassal, would, with French help and encouragement, detach not only Egypt but Syria and Mesopotamia from the Ottoman Empire, and build an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, which would work with France to exclude British influence and commerce from that region. Although this possibility was successfully opposed, French backing for a canal across Suez was not (see Suez Canal). The acquisition of a majority shareholding in the Canal company, by the government of Benjamin Disraeli, in 1876, to some extent retrieved the position. The Gladstone government’s occupation of Egypt in 1882, however, in order to forestall an embryonic Arab nationalism, alienated the French, who until 1904 pressed for British evacuation. One of several French expeditions, designed to produce this effect, brought the two countries close to war in 1898, in the Fashoda crisis. Another French approach, albeit overland, from Indo-China, had almost produced a conflict in 1893. The Japanese, in World War II, were more persistent and more effective.

The protection of the subcontinent from overland approaches involved the British in the affairs of Afghanistan, Persia (modern Iran), and the Ottoman Empire. All these were viewed as buffer states, in which British influence must be paramount. With this in mind the British twice invaded Afghanistan—in 1842, when they were humiliatingly ejected, and in 1879, with rather more success (see Afghan Wars; The Great Game). In 1905 the British promised to fight to maintain Afghan independence. Alliances were made with Persia, in 1809, 1812, and 1814, which lasted until 1838. And diplomatic battles raged continuously—with France, with Austria, but above all with Russia, as to whose voice should carry most weight at Constantinople (the Ottoman capital; modern İstanbul). That India lay behind all this activity was frequently admitted. Lord Malmesbury, foreign secretary in 1852 and 1858-1859, declared in 1853 that: “Turkish independence is of immense importance—without it we could hardly maintain our hold of India.” Lord Salisbury, while serving as prime minister and foreign secretary, observed in 1889 that “were it not for possessing India, we should trouble ourselves but little about Persia”.

B

From the Crimean War to Sarajevo

The contest for influence at Constantinople, escalated by Napoleon III in the early 1850s, was one reason for the British declaration of war on Russia in February 1854. For Palmerston, who became prime minister in 1855, the Crimean War represented a major opportunity, given the assistance of French armies, to weaken Russia for the indefinite future. For this reason he favoured an expedition to the eastern side of the Black Sea, which the Liberal politician the Duke of Argyll rightly described as having “an Anglo-Indian aspect”, tried to prolong the conflict for a further year, and at the Peace of Paris in 1856 attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove Russia from the Caucasus region—a move attempted, also without success, by Lord Curzon in 1919-1920.

The Peace of Paris of 1856 produced an international guarantee of the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The peacemaking also produced an agreement between Britain, France, and Austria to maintain those elements by force of arms. What the peacemaking could not achieve, however, was a halt to the expansion of the Russian Empire in Transcaspia (the region to the east of the Caspian Sea) and the khanates of Central Asia. By the early 1870s the foreign secretary Lord Granville was accusing Russia of advancing towards India behind a screen of démentis. Another opportunity to weaken Russia, this time with the help of Austro-Hungarian armies, almost presented itself in 1878, Austria-Hungary having departed from the terms of the Triple Treaty to the extent of agreeing that Russia might make gains in the Balkans following a successful war against the Ottoman Empire, but finding itself facing Russian gains far larger than it had sanctioned. War was averted by the internationalization of the issue at the Congress of Berlin, which removed much of eastern Europe from Ottoman rule. At the same time, Britain acquired Cyprus, in return for a guarantee of the integrity of non-European Turkey, and began to explore the possibilities of a railway from the Gulf of Alexandretta (today the Gulf of İskenderun) to the River Euphrates.

By the mid-1890s Lord Salisbury, whose scheme of 1878 for running Asia Minor through a system of British consuls had broken down, was seriously contemplating a further partition of the Ottoman Empire, the presence of Russia at Constantinople, and the British sacrifice of Egypt for a position further to the east, namely “the southern slope of the Taurus with Syria and Mesopotamia”. If Russia were allowed Constantinople, and the influence in the Levant that went with it, “the route to India through the Suez Canal would be so much exposed as not to be available except in times of the profoundest peace”. Salisbury dwelt on “the effect that the Russian possession of Constantinople would have upon the Oriental mind, and upon our position in India, which is so largely dependent on prestige”. Moving out of Egypt and to the Euphrates, to take up a position very similar to that which the Board of Control and Palmerston had feared Muhammed Ali wished to establish in the 1830s, would counter the influence of Constantinople in the Levant. It would also automatically improve relations with France, and thereby reduce opportunities for Bismarckian blackmail.

Salisbury failed to bring about this grand design, although his final administration did manage an agreement over Kuwait in 1901 which it was hoped would stop in its tracks the Berlin-Baghdad railway—a railway described by Lord Esher of the Committee of Imperial Defence as bringing the frontier of India “within four days of Europe”. As Russian influence continued to grow in Persia, and railways such as that from Orenburg to Toshkent, due to be completed in 1905, progressed, so India appeared increasingly vulnerable, and a settlement of Central Asian matters with her all the more necessary. The Anglo-French Agreement, or Entente Cordiale, of April 1904 was a step in this direction. As Lord Lansdowne put it in September 1903, “a good understanding with France would not improbably be the precursor of a better understanding with Russia”. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which did weaken Russia, did not weaken her enough to dissipate British fears that she would turn, in order to re-establish her military reputation, to the Indian frontier. When revising the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1905, Lansdowne tried to insert a clause binding Japan to maintain an army of 100,000 men for deployment in the defence of British India. The Japanese refused, thus making a direct agreement with Russia the only remaining resort. Such an agreement, covering Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet, was signed in August 1907.

Sir Edward Grey, who negotiated the 1907 Conventions, thought that “the pride of England would be broken if India were lost”. The period of “repose” on the North-West Frontier, however, did not outlast Russia’s recovery. By 1914 the Foreign Office was contemplating a revised convention over Persia and further concessions to avoid facing “a situation where our very existence as an Empire will be at stake”. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 (see Sarajevo Incident), the Foreign Office regarded it as certain that Russia and France between them would make life intolerable for British India and its buffer states if Britain remained neutral in the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. One official put one of the alternatives, should Britain stand aside, in the following stark terms: “Or France and Russia win. What would then be their attitude towards England? What about India and the Mediterranean?” In August 1914 the permanent under-secretary described India as “our chief concern”.